The JYLP 084 with Science Researcher, Writer, and Biosemiotician Jeremy Sherman - The Trying Self

[00:00:00] Intro: Knowledge is power Adjusting to not having my default be you know pst time so of course yes uh

[00:00:24] Jeremy: What prompted the move if i may ask

[00:00:27] Jacob: Uh well so i'm uh I've been a dj an Audio engineer for the last ten years and the lockdowns in the pandemic situation kind of took away my jobs um So it just kind of like catapulted this big series of events of changes in my life and had a you know a long-term relationship that split away and so i just kind of looking i'm about 29 now almost 30. So it's kind of like let's uh let's go somewhere else let's check it out

[00:00:52] Jeremy: Nice i like that you just shuffle the deck and do something different i yes i did more of that when i was younger I'm 65 now i have a feeling i'm much more Uh stationary or stabilized than i was Um but i had some i had some great moves

[00:01:08] Jacob: Like that when i was younger right I heard you i was listening to you on another podcast and you had mentioned um kind of like a mid-life crisis of sorts um to where you just kind of like shifted you kind of just went a different way um yeah that's right yeah i

[00:01:24] Jeremy: Yeah so there are there are these um these strange you could say Hairpin curves in life that are interesting to me um because we don't normally think of lives as doing that there's even the extreme theory that no one changes um uh yeah we i'll buy that as long as we also remember that everybody changes but The hairpin ones are really interesting to me yeah how that happens yeah and then because at the moment it seems catastrophic and you're like what am i doing and your whole sense of identity has just been you know changed or crumbled or questioned or whatever it is but then retrospectively you're like oh yeah of course it was that way you know yes there is that um i was joking to a friend yesterday that uh that my adulthood has been um uh just Alternating between midlife crises and second childhoods It's not exactly true but it but there's something to it anyway i like that kind of self-effacing i like that yeah it definitely puts the finger on something there's something um well cool man yeah um i'm really

[00:02:32] Jacob: Thanks again for uh for working with me to get this rescheduled i was really looking forward to this talk and um i've been kind of like listening to you on some other podcasts and i was listening to your talk at google and just like oh yeah i'm so excited to talk about these things so fun we can talk about anything what do you like to talk about a little bit of everything i mean the A few years back so i actually kind of um i've always been kind of you know fairly fascinated with just the edge of ideas and um just like what we're doing like going very meta on kind of like this whole situation here life um so but and then a couple years back i had a lot of uh kind of like mental health depression kind of came into this point of wow how do i Better take care of myself what am i doing incorrectly what's going on like so i start studying myself i start studying what a self is uh

[00:03:24] Jacob: Start studying consciousness just like through this kind of mental health journey i got even more fascinated with um just really like selfhood and studying uh what it is that we do and why it is that we do it and why it is that we matter and how and using your words how does matter uh how does matter give rise does that mattering emerge from matter there's one more version of it yeah so it's always matter all of it really fascinates me yeah ah Great and the and um most of the literature that deals with this question what is the self starts at the level of humans or maybe animals it starts at the Level of feelings and thoughts um but that's not our approach in fact the guy

[00:04:12] Jeremy: The main guy i work with this guy i've been working with for a quarter century Terrence Deacon compares that to trying to understand Hair starting with porcupines um yes porcupine quills are hair they're Highly evolved and highly specialized So there's a difference in our approach and i just think about it before the podcast started um that it's on the edge of pretentious to say it but i'm going to say it i realize i can actually just say it which is that um i'm not like other social scientists or life scientists um i go back to the Origins now that sounds like some creepy Uh sacred text citation now what i mean By it is that i'm what i call an originist which is i'm operating on an assumption that's in implied in science but not necessarily practice and certainly not in consciousness studies which is that the Prior sciences have to explain what the Later sciences assume and until they do we don't really know what we're talking about when we talk about something like consciousness or something any of those uh high-level Uh assumptions so unlike most cognitive science researchers or even social scientists we Have to start from the chemical origins of trying that cells are the only things that try

[00:05:39] Jeremy: And we can imagine anything like a self i can imagine that the river is trying to get to the sea or the computers trying to help me out but really when you look at it we're the only ones that try and if you want to understand trying which is a it's an inescapable concept In the life and social sciences and an Inapplicable concept in the in the physical sciences That is you can never talk about molecules trying but you have to talk about living things drying you have to be able to explain trying from its origins in chemistry explain no smoke and mirrors just how did What is trying and how did it start and actually that's the reverse of the question how it started will give you a better sense of what trying is oh wow okay so do you see is there is there a big gap between survival in trying uh because no actually no

[00:06:29] Jeremy: So survival is actually the key to it and we're living through a strange period in the sciences in the in the life and social sciences and that would include cognitive science and philosophy and all that where we uh we think we found the answer because we got evolution and then we got dna well dna is not trying you know this stuff looks like snot if you take it out of a body and put it on table looks like it's not okay and it's not and snot is even more alive than it's a bunch of chemicals right it's not about anything for anyone that is trying to do anything until it's in a living organism but there's also this assumption that somehow i mean it's a very strange and loose and not scientific concept that somehow a new thing came Into the universe called natural selection and that somehow started life Now we know that's not the case i mean we have all these details about how evolution works and how it has worked in historically in natural history but we are still trying to figure out what the origins of life is so obviously it doesn't solve the problem the

[00:07:19] Jeremy: Struggle for existence is something that darwin assumed he declared that he had no explanation for it he assumed the Struggle for existence And then explained how that would speciate into different ways of struggling with respect to different environments that's what he did and he knew it and people tried to say didn't you just explain the origins of life and he said no i didn't i don't get to say that um Somehow we've forgotten that so and the Struggle for existence this is the most fundamental thing which is that we have to struggle for our existence because um things fall apart it's the second law of thermodynamics things are max things are moving towards disorder or getting all Mixed up and we have to keep ourselves in order so i just started my day out here and i don't have much schedule but i do have gen regenerating 240 billion Cells today and i might do that without feeling it without thinking i have to run in order to stay in place i have to hustle to just keep myself alive And that's true of all organisms so that's where we have to explain how

[00:08:44] Jeremy: That kind of struggle to self-regenerate could ever emerge from simple chemistry not quantum mechanics or anything like that we don't operate at that level how it could ever happen by accident that we would get in the business of regenerating ourselves faster than we would otherwise degenerate yeah wow fascinating okay so how does your like your day-to-day work when you're actually studying this because it's um Perhaps i'm not super familiar with the real hard time definition of philosophy of science or anything like that but i do see you know science over here in philosophy over here to me philosophy is uh just so much more of the pondering side of things so how do you how do you take these questions and actually bring them into science yeah so uh i'm working with a scientist and i'm We debate whether i get to call myself a scientist or a science writer because of a way in which we uh an assumption we make about science um we think the science scientific revolution started with um empiricism in The enlightenment that is the Bringing rigor to trying to figure out to testing things out against reality so philosophy

[00:10:00] Jacob: Was doing a lot of theorizing and then they said no if you really want to do this stuff you have to ground it in experiments um so a lot of people assume and scientists do assume that um if you're Not doing experiments you're not a scientist but actually i think that there have been two scientific revolutions so far and i think we need one more in fact i'm writing an article about it just now so the first one was way back with let's say pythagoras or uh plato or aristotle it's Bringing rigor to formalism is all the ability to make mathematical and logical models Basically manipulating symbols and doing it for maximum Coherence means that you're not talking about both sides of your mouth you're maintaining consistency and that was the first scientific revolution and a guy like francis bacon realizes it's not enough to do that i mean you can come up with really coherent theories That have no correspondence to reality

[00:11:07] Jeremy: Um you know i for example i could say that everything in the universe is made from uh jello gelatin that's a perfectly coherent theory it's or i could more popularly i could say it's all good yes it's a perfectly incoherent theory and yes if you if you define good broadly enough to include bad sure it's true you know but uh but so he so they realized francis bacon realized no you gotta you gotta make this stuff correspond to sense data So um that's the second scientific Revolution what i think is missing is a third one which brings rigor to Categorization and this comes out of some work by a philosopher out of the early american philosopher charles sanders purse who points out that there are actually three basic kinds of logical moves deduction induction and Abduction okay abduct so And i could explain more about that but the heart of it is right now we categorize pretty damn casually especially on these big intractable questions like uh life and mind and motivation so if you talk to a um if you talk motivation is the core currency in the life and social sciences basically trying and we assume that there's something inside of an organism that would have an appetite or a will or

[00:12:36] Jacob: A motivation uh that would trigger some Kind of behavior but if you ask a social scientist i mean they live and breathe motivation if you ask them what a motivation is they can't tell you they know what a motivation does and they mostly identify motivations by Their consequences if i see you making effort i'll assume that you have a motivation well to me that's no more rigorous than Saying you have a soul you can give it you can give it a uh you can give it a spiritual sounding name or a technical sounding name doesn't matter naming is not explaining so that's so uh that's where the originism comes in which is if you really want to understand a phenomenon you have to explain what how it emerged from what preceded it yeah it is interesting the assumptions uh that we assumptions slash leaps that we're like okay yeah and keep going next one Uh what do you think like the this third stage of science do you think that we're at a place where uh you know the

[00:13:39] Jacob: Current rules of science the current edges of science so to say um are kind of constraining us from answering important questions like how do we when we're going to expand into this um i don't know next stage that next stage of science what are we going to lose from this like what are we going to have to not only lose but add in um i

[00:13:59] Jeremy: Understand that's not a species yeah no that's right it's a good question um i mostly don't think we have to add anything we have to remember something about the sciences right now they're kind of multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary that is that you francis bacon basically said we're going to send out a search party and do all this empirical research and it's going to each search party is going to be exploring some patch of reality and trying to understand what's going on there and we've been doing that now for 400 years 350 years um and the

[00:14:33] Jeremy: Patches have expanded and they have encroached on each other in delightful ways so we get this sense that there are parallels for example between what animals do and what humans do or i mean it's all sorts of parallels um but it's still it's um it's trans-disciplinary at best i actually am arguing that it needs to be sequi-disciplinary that is the science is actually are stacked in order of appearance we you know the universe is 14 billion years old and for the first 10 billion years that's two-thirds of its existence we see nothing that needs to be explained in terms of trying nothing i mean not in this deck of the woods anyway we haven't seen anything yet man no doubt it happened elsewhere earlier or whatever but trying seems to be something different from nothing but chemistry that is if you're playing in science i assume i take science to be a campaign to find natural explanations for all natural phenomena which means that we can't say well there's some magical thing that was added that explains this thing you can't do that if you do that for one thing you can't def you could do it to anything you know i can explain lightning by the lightning wanter you know or something like that the magical invisible unknowable supernatural lightning wanter so if i can't do it if i do it anywhere i can't do it you know i do it everywhere so science is just that campaign so um

[00:15:55] Jeremy: So that means that we have to be able to explain emergencies with no smoke and Mirrors no abstractions that an allow Us to smuggle in something um to explain it and so that's what i'm that's what i'm basically arguing and once we have explained it we can reduce to it so there's this idea that you know all there is in the universe all we ever see is let's say we drop it down to the lowest level subatomic particles or field forces whatever it is therefore all explanations have to be reduced to that or else they don't make any sense and i'm saying no actually that's not true i'm an emergent reductionist which is to say that once we have really explained That how physical work changes the likeliness Of this happening versus that happening once we've explained how a phenomenon emerges then we are we can reduce to that explained phenomena and until then we can't so and then in a way that's a standard that makes some sense obviously we can't

[00:17:05] Jeremy: Do it to the pre-einsteinian or pre-quantum level yet that's not this season's researchers project we don't know enough yet to be able to do that but we at least need to mark what we don't have explained and we don't do that very well in especially cognitive science so you get so to get to give you know a quick illustration in cognitive science the hard problem is If we are just these cause and effect mechanisms if animals are basically mechanisms like machines you know uh or Computers popular notion these days then How do we explain experience or what they call qualia the red the feeling of redness i call that the made harder problem um yes if you assume we're nothing but machines that don't try to do anything um yeah you're going to have a hell of a time explaining qualia or experience From that but that's not where we started we were trying if you don't even have an explanation for what trying is you're don't you know don't expect uh much of

[00:18:13] Jeremy: Explaining consciousness out of computation you know and the same is true with the free will debate that thing will go on back and forth the determinant is saying uh you are nothing but determinist chemistry um which is funny because you actually means that you're not just that it's a distinctive category of thing and then the free will people say no obviously you have will and i'm we're arguing that it's got a kind of autonomy well if we don't know what will is once again if we don't know what motivation is from its origins in chemistry what are we even talking about you know it's this unknown quantity that everybody thinks they know um but they only know by its consequences we see willful behavior but We can't explain we know it happens in bodies we know it is instantiated in

[00:19:02] Jeremy: Chemistry but we haven't explained what it is so that's where our work has been primarily focused oh and a while ago you asked how do we do this work well yeah sorry for getting off track and for perhaps having too much coffee i'll just i'll say this one last thing oh you're fine i tend to get a little long um but that's because there's a lot of different things to hold in the air at the same time i'm here for it man i love it okay good so the um I think that natural philosophy was the right name for the field and that science is a great name for it but actually i think that we should keep in mind that science is not just testing Things out tests are hell expensive

[00:19:43] Jacob: So that means that what you have to actually do is prioritize your testing which means that you're shopping among interpretations of reality that are worth testing and not worth testing so you cannot be a scientist without Engaging in this fundamental Topic of shopping among interpretations What is the best fitting interpretation for reality and that tends among Scientists to get the short shrift as if that's as if as if that's not part of science as if science is just lab tensor testing or as

[00:20:18] Jeremy: If you know or as if we leave that to the philosophers no we're still all shopping among interpretations and then we test them out and i'm arguing that the third scientific revolution just would remember that we're a little loose about our categorization of things like motivation or will or love Um so my approach is uh is a our approach the one i got by working with Terrence Deacon is different from that i actually have an explanation for both junkyards and love from the origins of life from chemistry as i have a definition of love that comes out of my origins of life explanation and no it ain't poetry it ain't poetry at all okay what is it what would you how would you explain love well um so uh it's doing dedicated work to maintain something you're dependent upon um now where you draw the line and start Calling it love which is a feeling we associate with uh animals and particularly with humans that's one thing but if we're talking about a certain kind of behavior from its origins um what i mean by dedicated work is of all the things you could do You constrain your yourself to certain Work that's actually our explanation for Um motivation or will or trying anyway that

[00:21:45] Jeremy: Is i'm not my breakfast my trying is not my breakfast that breakfast could have been used for any number of things including starting a fire that burns down my house whatever um it tends to do more damage than not energy gradients tend to do more damage than not but i am a constraint that channels that energy into effort to do what to regenerate that constraint That is i got a to-do list today but actually the to-do list is a narrowing of possibilities i could dither all day but instead i limit what i do all day to Certain things that will enable me to limit what i do tomorrow To keep myself going i am actually an emergent constraint that's what i think of and when i'm dead that emergent constraint is this go on as a popped bubble or a whirlpool from yesterday i mean that i don't actually think there's any i am a limitation on what happens i am Not something added that makes that happen it's a way that chemical interactions can actually limit what happens um so uh love would also be that it's doing dedicated work it's being deliberated

[00:22:57] Jeremy: Or deliberate that is i'm unliberating myself i'm saying to be to maintain access to this thing or to maintain something i care about i have to do dedicated work and how do i know that I'm dependent on it if you remove it am i as paul mccartney said suddenly not half the man i used to be that as you can tell when something um has failed to maintain something that it depends upon because it becomes degenerate in some ways i Don't mean degenerate in the psychological or you know i just mean uh Were hobbled so this is going on from the very origins of life um now i want to name it By another name i think that love and addiction refer to the same behavior the difference is connotation if i think a relationship is going to turn out well for someone i'll say that's love if i think it's not going to turn out well for them i'm going to say it's addiction and i as a result i'm busy a lot of my Time stripping the connotations off of words for example i would say that i am an incredibly lucky guy because i happen to Really like my addictions i have some

[00:24:13] Jeremy: Addictions that i just i just have killer addictions i love no i don't mean killer that is i think they're gonna sustain me as long as possible yeah i think they're killing them yeah they maintain me i don't feel like half the man i used to be or like i'm gonna be deprived of them i mean of course i am in the end but uh or in my decline but Anyway boy was that a lot i hope

[00:24:34] Jacob: It was so good i feel like you poked so many different parts of my uh my brain to spit out different ideas i was thinking about um i was thinking about pan psycho pansys actually do you have any uh what's your opinion on pan psychics and basically what is it that matter gives rise to consciousness or matter is an innate feature or

[00:24:55] Jeremy: Consciousness is an innate feature of matter i think is what it is correct so there are there are there are three main moves that are alternatives to the emergence move that i take so um you got this basic question that science has somehow dodged for all these years What is trying and how did it start and as a result the culture wars are at a standstill because science really doesn't have an answer to that question and uh fundamentalism does Fundamentalism's answer is mysterion

[00:25:27] Jeremy: That's what we call that school of thought which is there's some special thing that causes it's the equivalent of that lightning story i told you before and believe it or not we have the same thing going on in science that is you can be a mysterian in science too um i would say dawkins is borderline mysterious um he's actually an equivocator and most mysterians are that means that i mean sometimes he's talking as if genes actually are trying to do something genes are patterns you know patterns within molecules so genes are trying to do something but then he also backtracks on that and says i don't really mean that i just mean that it's the equivalent of that and that explains it so in a way he's a mysterian but in a way he's also what we call an eliminativist an eliminativist Says uh on this question what is trying and uh and how does it start wrong question uh there is no trying you may try to think that there's trying but there is no trying um it's a trying Is a figment and to which we respond figment to whom

[00:26:29] Jeremy: Because there's no you don't trick molecules the atoms are not tricked they cannot be deceived they're not trying to do anything they're not busy interpreting their situation to achieve their goals so when you say that stuff you're talking about both sides your mouth so i've named two so far mysterion is you come up with some black box term that explains it like god or a higher power uh that wants something or whatever The eliminativism says wrong question there is no trying you can try to believe there's trying but there isn't choose determinism it's another way of Laying out the hypocrisy of that what the **** you know and then the other version of it is it's a wrong question because everything has always been trying and that's what you mentioned as panpsychism yeah um and no i would say uh You know i just find it completely bogus um uh another one of the many dodges we

[00:27:26] Jeremy: Get to the question makes fine poetry i'm happy to i'm happy to believe the whole cosmos is trying to believe uh is trying to achieve things or whatever you know i indulge in that kind of romantic notion that's my note that's my definition of romance is that the universe is somehow aligned with us it's got our back whatever we it wants whatever we happen to uh To also want um uh So i love that stuff but as escapism I don't but i no i don't think that's true i don't think the universe wants anything i don't think there's anything outside the universe that wants anything which is why i'm burdened with the emergent's question how did it start because it wasn't there before the before now if you know you could say that you're basically going you're going the route of aristotle or The pet rock um people of the 1960s jeffrey hear about the Pet rock fad yeah There's a while when you go out it was a fad that people were buying pet rocks and they were just these rocks that came to you in a nest of straw in a box so

[00:28:34] Jeremy: What i'm saying is um it's like it's a form of animism um uh much like aristotle saying that a rock falls to the ground because it wants to arrive at its proper position that it belongs further away from god than Humans a fine notion for his time bless his pointed head i mean it was good i wouldn't have come up with it at that time i'm impressed but at the same time no it's not true some things try and other things don't and we know it and we should admit it and anybody who says anyone who's an eliminativist should put their money where their mouth is and start talking like without using any words that imply motivation will appetite preference you know if you think that it's all chemistry go ahead describe it like that Live it and if you think that it's all alive then start taking a little bit better care of your pet rock and led lights because um uh because you know You know otherwise you're saying you know it's you're relying on

[00:29:41] Jeremy: Um it being counter-intuitive so there's wishful thinking but i also think that's dreadful thinking which is um it must be true because you don't want to believe it um and i think both are bogus we want to believe all sorts of things and that's irrelevant to whether they're true so go ahead what is the it makes me think that just like the line between you know what humans do acting as if versus truth uh oh no that's a huge that's a great Question yeah i mean if you know where i was going with that feel free to expand because i feel like that is that is a lot of like where our arguments go we're arguing over is this true or not true and a lot of it is kind of not even trying to prove that it's trying to say how do humans act as if at this point in history or whatever uh yeah so um

[00:30:30] Jeremy: So uh yes that's a big deal to me because actually the last two years i've been working on a whole other project that's very much related in but you might think indirectly um i called psychoproctology and i am uh i'm trying to find an objective a more objective definition of **** um and i'm trying to figure out how to stop or prevent assholery Without becoming an **** in the process um uh and that and once again I'm an originist that is i have to explain a-holes from their origins if i want to understand what if i want a good definition of them i can't just pull it out my butt you know based on who i don't like uh you know one of the big questions for me one of the ways i frame the question of objectivity is what is a butt head since it can't just be whoever i happen to butt heads with you know what's you know so um but

[00:31:26] Jeremy: It gets me into this whole i think there are plenty of nasty animals by our standards there's plenty of predators and parasites and all that but being an a-hole is actually a human thing and it comes out of having language which language would make us a really freaked out animal um if you compare what a dog could worry about that night bef uh before going to bed with what a human could it's we got way more real and imaginary Threats and missed opportunities to consider and way more means to consider we are extremely anxious and we are also an extremely evasive organism because language also gives us a way to rationalize dismissing anxious thoughts So that's confirmation bias is basically what it is that is we're especially anxious and we have good ways

[00:32:17] Jeremy: Of avoiding things we have we have skillful ways of avoiding things that we don't want to think about um uh and confirmation biases so all organisms have to interact selectively with their environments they have to take in food and not poison that is like i said earlier energy is volatile stuff my breakfast could burn down my house so um when it's running through my body it is also degenerating me so i have to i have to take in the right energy gradients and not the wrong ones and if you apply that at the level of language you get confirmation bias i want to take in the ideas that regenerate my mojo not The ideas that degenerate my mojo that's confirmation bias and by my definition You know normal people recognize confirmation bias is a problem they have to manage and a-holes think of confirmation or retreat confirmation bias as a solution to all their problems so what's going on here related to your idea so we will wonder whether we're Talking to someone who is just trying to win and um we will wonder whether we should Um uh humor people or tell them what we really think

[00:33:36] Jeremy: Our best guesses which is there's a huge difference between honesty and truth that was completely overlooked in the last election which is um he tells it like it is he's honest no that obviously you can honestly believe untrue things that's not you know you Can honestly believe things that you know aren't true we see plenty of evidence of it i mean it's a kind of method acting you know we got this from michael cohen who says after that he used to be able to put himself in a fit of complete rage outrage at someone for something he knew that the dumb one didn't do you know they were perfectly good at that sort of stuff so all the theatrics around this all the melodrama um all the potential For falling into what i call infallibility battles an infattability battle is either your you turn out to be right about everything and i turn out to be wrong about everything or vice versa

[00:34:28] Jeremy: It's like a death match about who's right about everything it'd be like where if i said wow you thought that green day album came out in 96 you don't know anything do you know it's that you can fall into these things so incredibly easily and why because i think what humans are trying to adapt in three different arenas we have to adapt to reality that's a long-term goal it's the same goal that all organisms have to deal with the one rule is adapt to reality or die but we also are primarily and most Pressingly adapting to our own emotions That is trying to maintain comfort in our own skin and in between that we're adapting to society which can either give us reality Checks or can pander to our need to feel comfort in our own skin so i distinguish these as um Adapting to the likely story that is this the realistic one the light the socially liked story the popular one and the likable story the Story that feels good in my own skin

[00:35:34] Jeremy: Yeah i'm thinking about how the self is expressed in each like you know all three of these but kind of two of them and it comes into reality as the third one or whatever uh i think have you read much uh carl jung uh very uh a little enough to know what he's talking about but not enough to claim any detailed understanding right i'm uh i'm mostly just super fascinated with him uh he's it's incredibly like it's so I don't even know if dense is the word it makes me think about my own experience so much as i'm reading it or listening to it that it's like i gotta pause it sometimes but uh i was thinking about how um i think in one of his books I think it was memories dreams and reflections he describes kind of his mother and after a while he establishes um like her number two personality versus her number one personality and like who she would come out with um in this in this societal like there's basically like two different sides of ourselves you know our internal experience and then who we act out as in um in our interactions with one

[00:36:37] Jeremy: Another and uh he would just start to point it out like very blatantly very bluntly in this book um like oh this is mom as her version Two or as her personality too side of herself um and it's very fascinating like our internal experience being um so different often than our external Experience and right yeah Yeah also uh i would say that the Our external depends on who we're around um yeah i mean i don't know if you've ever thrown a party where you have friends coming in from different parts of your life and it becomes difficult to know who to be in that situation because you've been Sort of different with different people my actually my parallel to it is a mixing board as i got all these traits that i'm trying to mix in the right blend for um for the particular situation i'm in yeah And i can be too much or too little on any of them which is fundamental to my work because a lot of people say you know always be this way to the max what I call moral maxing no it's not like that you can uh my peace of mind comes From thinking from being

[00:37:51] Jacob: From wondering whether i'm too much or too little of any particular trait at any time that's the closest i'm going to get the peace of mind is if i'm wondering equally whether i was too assertive or not assertive enough yeah i'm watching both sides of the winding road i don't want to just try to avoid one of them so it's like a mixing board of different qualities that you bring out in different situations um and so the number one or the social Persona this was a big question during the enlightenment uh um uh diderot was Interested in this the question of whether you know do you wear different masks over your face or do you are you nothing but masks

[00:38:31] Jeremy: Um uh and you know do you have an authentic self and my answer is no i don't um that is I'm more molten than that uh um and i can actually explain why also in terms of origins um that is i could explain why we would have the impression That there is a core authentic self but also why we would get that by actually by other means so i mean it's a whole other piece of the work i do which i could describe briefly if you wanted it yeah okay go ahead and describe briefly and then um actually yeah go ahead i want to go okay all right so um language enables me to describe or detail any model of anything Including myself so what happens with language is i can imagine stepping out of myself and seeing myself and then describing myself So i think of that this was early work of mine the Four eyes that make up a mind the first Eye is just being it's just um it's eye To the zeroth power i call it's just uh it's what we have in common with all animals we're just being we're operating on habits now on animals habits main or

[00:39:46] Jeremy: Plants habits may not be learned in our case they're learned um and we are in the habit-making business that is what consciousness is for it's for making habits consciousness is not a computer it's a virtual computer generator anything that i cannot resolve Ends up rising to consciousness and once i can resolve it into a habit i will i Will turn it into a habit and stop thinking about it that's what consciousness is for from my perspective and it is largely it's deeply emotive that is it's triggered by doubt so i wrote a whole book doubt a user's guide doubt a natural history um uh

[00:40:25] Jeremy: Because i think doubt yeah so that's what rises consciousness that's the interesting stuff okay but i to the first either the zero power is just the running behavior it's my behavior most of it by habit including habits of consciousness about how to turn things into habits but i'll set that aside i to the first power is my ability to tell a running unexamined story about myself so for example i could say i'm uh i'm of jewish descent or i'm a people person or i'm verbal or something like that but once so that's me stepping out to describe myself but i can keep that going so i could then go out in order of iteration and say i like to think that i'm a people person Um which is me telling a story about the purse about the narrator telling the story about my Behavior yeah so that's i squared And it's actually where science gets interesting the science is where you because once you see that you are telling stories you uh you can question the stories in a way you can't if i simply said what i call second yesing myself i am a

[00:41:35] Jeremy: People per i'm a good person and i've checked with myself and i agree with myself that i'm a good person so that would be one thing second guessing really starts with i squared where i can say wait i like to say that i'm a good person which raises a question and then i ions i mean this was early work when i was punting uh ad nauseam uh but ions Was where you recognize that for every story you tell about us yourself another story could be told about the teller of that story and that you'll you know basically you'll bonk you'll run out of steam on what are called orders of inference so i could say i like to say Or i often say that i like to think that i'm a people person you know at that point it gets kind of squirrely but what you do get from the recognition that you could keep on telling different stories about yourself out layer after layer is that um you're guessing who you are so i have a real problem by now major red flags when anybody tells me that's not what i was doing or that's not what i'm that uh or i'm not uh i'm not a

[00:42:43] Jeremy: Game player or any of that self-description i know why we would do it would be convenient and it's even convenient to take someone's word for it but that talk is walkism the assumption that what i say about myself is an accurate description of what's going on with me totally bogus to me if someone says i've got integrity i know that they haven't given a moment's thought to what integrity is it just it's just good Bling so they're going to wear it's what the other cool kids are wearing so i mean i've had i've had trump supporters simply come out of the box saying i'm a critical thinker and you can tell they have no idea what critical thinking is they haven't thought about it at all but they want to tell you they are because why it's ornamentation i mean it's what the cool kids are wearing it gives you cred so why not say it right um so when someone says to me don't tell me how i feel they're right i'm not in a position to tell them what they're that what they feel they're not they're i'm not an authority but neither are they i never i never can tell anybody don't

[00:43:43] Jeremy: Tell me how i feel like i'm the authority i mean obviously we know that there are plenty of people who don't know what they're feeling what am i exempt from that of course not no i'm So you get to have your guess about what i'm feeling i get to have mine but no you don't get to you don't get to pull rank on me just because you're inside yourself yes you're inside yourself that makes you both more credible and less credible yeah right we get we get Really trapped uh we get trapped in our self-hood uh in a lot of ways and it kind of like hinders the ability to uh i don't know solve problems or really stay on the surface it's a lot of i feel like so much of your work is probably uh map versus territory woods versus forest Sort of like we missed the point you know where we think we're doing this thing yeah though i would say we are trapped in our selfhood every organism is hustling for it on its Own behalf um we are all selfish um in the sense like blueish that is work to some degree or another we are going to prioritize ourselves so i have

[00:44:48] Jeremy: No use for this version of things that says uh self selfhood is the problem Get over yourself no i'm very interested in getting over myself i'm an ironist i'm actually i'm an ironist not just by style or tradition i'm from jewish stock But because i actually think irony is the only adaptive response To the **** of switchbacks and Reversals that are ontologically real that is we know that there are reversals in the universe and we are tracking them so there will be times when we're heading in one direction because it's going in that direction and we will want to track back the other direction and we will miss that is there will be times when i uh prematurely uh turn to it change my mind or Postmaturely change my mind there will be slapstick What i'm saying is in a world that has reversals what's adaptive in one situation will be maladaptive in another and we're just guessing we're trying to figure out when to be there which means that it's going to be slapstick there i mean so Yes so this idea that i got an authentic self or that the solution is to stop caring about myself i just i have no use

[00:46:09] Jeremy: For that stuff anymore and this is after years of digging buddhism and i lived for seven years on the world's largest hippie commune where there was a whole lot of selflessness now i'm trying to figure out when to be more self-assertive and when to be less self-assertive when to jut my arms as you're a dj when the crowded dance floor um it's not the property lines are Not marked out uh everybody would like the freedom to move wherever um i got to Figure out where to jut out my elbows and where to tuck them in And the idea that okay everybody on the count of three stopping yourself just forget it's just unlaughable It's not gonna it's not gonna happen i'll become selfless when i die okay that's what i it's not my calendar but i will eventually meld into the selflessness that's right that's right later i was yeah uh i like that you brought it into the world of djing because i was actually thinking too i'm very fascinated with kind of the internet and social media and the Next layer this it gives us this whole other layer of ego or self that we can be or say we are this you know we say

[00:47:20] Jeremy: We'll share our highlight reel and a lot of times we'll get caught up in thinking that's what our life should look like so when it doesn't match up to our highlight reel so to say i love it creates quarrels with us and i was also thinking um so me as me as a dj and me as a uh you know as i get older i really try

[00:47:36] Jacob: To try to figure out like how do i how do i take my creative side and put it into like this artistry version of myself like how do i like this so i have kind of an alias jacobfromtheinternet i used to be known as dj kronos and i've melded it into jacobfromtheinternet and it's this cool thing that um and i'm always practicing i'm not very good at it but i think if i continue to do it where i can get on stage and i kind of have this like internal all right i'm showing up as jacobfromtheinternet like i'm not just jacob and it helps me be an entertainer it helps me step outside of myself it helps me like be more of a goofball tell more jokes i'm present um and i look at people

[00:48:15] Jeremy: Like in uh wwe wrestling like the rock there's this scene in this movie where he kind of explains where he's being polite and he's talking with these people and they kind of tick him off and eventually he's like do you smile with the rock he's like he gets all into his high up uh smell with rock is cooking any and then he explains that's kind of it is me but it's this amped up version of myself and he's doing it for entertainment purposes and i think about how we you know common people all have kind of a version of this uh with our social media presence and i think i think it goes over a lot of our heads i think um i'm very cognizant of it because i

[00:48:50] Jacob: I don't want to **** myself and i think i have in the past before i really started studying this selfhood and like how it makes me act and stuff um so what do you what do you think about social media it's very related uh to uh

[00:49:02] Jeremy: Kind of a central thesis for me because i'm trying to figure out uh **** prevention and i think the fundamental the fundamental tool i have found for **** prevention is what i'll call optimal illusion or safe escapism or kidding yourself in ways that help more than harm so um it's not just for our public presentation a lot of it is for ourselves we're saying what we need to hear we're adopting a persona um and i don't think it's very different from what we do um in a religious context that is we go into a religious place i was just noticing the other day that prayer we never really look at how prayer Uh presents is a kind of virtual signaling you don't have to pray out loud but the prayer is a virtual signal to yourself as you come across as humble and supplicating and respectful and all of that sort of stuff we don't tend to focus on it that much i've written articles about god's dogs and blogs and how it's related to this which is um we need

[00:50:08] Jeremy: More audience than we can get these days especially because uh what's in shorter supplies demand that is why because everybody's out creating now that we have the social media that is uh you know and not only this accumulation of past creativity that is piling up at This point so um your chances of being found and are low but in a way so i when i started Blogging i've now written over a thousand articles and i have some audience but when i started i had to engage in strategic gullibility i had to pretend that there was an audience that gave a **** what i said um and i and i love that and i don't think that's very different from having a dog or praying to god um just imagine You got an audience but the thing is we have to do this stuff carefully uh i'm interested in safe escapism i'm saying that entertainment and escapism are a human necessity given language we are way too anxious we Could not possibly be realistic all the time our brains would fry um it's just not workable um so we need

[00:51:13] Jeremy: To take these pit stops of mode where we get our mojo replenished and they can take all sorts of forms they can take the form of virtue signaling online they Can take the form of masturbation i actually um they can take the form of belonging to a church where you believe that you guys have got something True and wise and real and that you're a virtuous and all of that and it is but in a way i'm dealing with the same question they were dealing with um uh iconoclas the original Iconoclast and there's an issue that comes up over and over in uh in cultural history which i which i would describe this way is Virtual virtue a virtue or a vice It's virtual virtue so me posing as though i'm virtuous or a stud in bed or i think of wwe i Think of porn as he as the counterpart to porn is to uh libido what wwf is to Aggression um yeah okay so you got so we got all these mediums that we can do it in uh that's virtual vice another question is virtual vice a virtue or a vice but what i want to say is it's a ver virtual virtue is it's a virtue when it motivates

[00:52:33] Jeremy: Real virtue and it's a vice when it Motivates uh and it's a substitute for real virtue if i come out of a movie where i'll uh feel aligned with the hero and the poor person asked me for some money and i say **** no i just gave in the theater you know i just saved all of rwanda you know so that's that was the issue for uh Abraham it was the issue for the islamic movement there's a whole thing about false idols um it was an issue for Luther he brought it up as frequent communion which is people going to church and absolving themselves and then being nasty all week long they're all dealing with the same thing uh and um so anyway i believe that we have perfect Models for how to engage in optimal Illusion when i watch a movie i totally believe it i'm right in it i am don cheadle saving rwanda or i am the Hero but if you tap me on the shoulder i know for sure that i'm not don cheadle i know where i am and when i turn the thing off i get back to reality it's not how far out i go into self-indulgence as Dj kronos or whoever it's whether i know to

[00:53:46] Jeremy: Come back and i've been to a trump rally because seeing fascism up close was on my bucket list i went to one in tupelo mississippi i swear the thing was just like a heavy metal concert people are all caught it's all cosplay people go out for a night of entertainment they're going to chat along with lyrics they're not thinking about they'd like the lyrics just because they're badass the only difference between a trump rally and uh i don't know the current bans of that kind of the

[00:54:14] Jeremy: Counterpart but you could find them you know let's say it's like a dj night out the only difference is that the dj night out when people are done they get their cars in their parking lot and they return to reality that's the only difference the problem with the trump rally is they basically and there's something to it they say i can get even more juiced on this if i pretend i found something more real than reality and then they kind of keep stuck to that reality when they if they leave the concert so to say they leave the valley and they're still on their phones in the facebook groups that's right so you i'm not saying you have to do it by going to rallies you could do this online too and that's the problem so it's not optimal illusion that's um that's where illusion gets dangerous we have to continue to return to reality adapt to reality or die is the only rule for three you know 3.8 billion years i don't see us as Having somehow escaped that one so i'm all into posing i love posing and i also

[00:55:12] Jeremy: Can say that my life's been lucky because i've had to do less of it and then i realized around 50 i actually could afford to do less of it because i actually don't need status i have money from by other means so i actually don't need status in order to put food on my table it's an incredibly dumb lucky situation and as a result this is who i am all the time i don't Actually brace myself for a podcast interview this is this is who i am i'm not i'm not thinking about my ideas i'm living them there's like you know it's a kind of seamless relationship between the ideas and the practice and this is how i talk but that's just the luxury of not having to humor people and this relates to love For you young folk inc people often fall into the pattern of Assuming they need a partner for lots of reasons that they Some of it is hormonal certainty at your age i couldn't resist um some of it is also social pressure or social encouragement um that's changing But it's changing in complicated ways love songs are still uh this about the fantastic urge to

[00:56:28] Jacob: Merge and how it feels when you merge or how bitter you feel in breakup and how a breakup proves that the other person was wrong or unkind or Immoral sort of stuff like that so you still get all that but what i'm noticing is um any encumbrance Any obligation to an external source is Going to constrain you and what you're looking for is constraints that grow you in the directions you want to grow but

[00:56:56] Jeremy: You can get them lots of different ways and partnership is a complicated way to do that for example i was married for 16 and a half years great marriage but we live in the modern world where there are lots of lifestyle choices and by happenstance we sort of diverged to where what i thought what was a priority for me to do was disappointing to her and vice versa so we released ourselves from it and we thank each other for the freedom we got from it what i want to say is that love Means doing dedicated work to maintain something you depend on and you got to be careful what you love because that is going to constrain your work it's going to dedicate it's going to mean that you will be spending effort doing something keeping up appearances for example i think there's an element of that in partnership that

[00:57:45] Jacob: Is you have to you have to work hard to maintain in the other person the sense Of your reliable fascination with them That's a major obligation it's wonderful Bless it if that's what you want but to walk into such encumbrances I think there's something to minimizing encumbrances if you are going to pay attention to reality we also know that people can fall right off a cliff by minimizing encumbrances you know you can become uh You know uh i forget the guy um Yeah you can you know if you're unconstrained you can believe all sorts of crap and really fall apart so figuring out wiring up the right external constraints to support your internal constraints that is my internal constraints are the source of my behavior they're what limits my behavior to what i do and instead of what i don't do and i have a bunch of internal constraints and i want to align them with the external constraints that help me grow in the directions

[00:58:51] Jeremy: I bet i should grow they're just bets i could be wrong about where i should grow but that's a thing but anyway to be picking up constraints haphazardly or because other people are doing it dangerous things to do at 29 i know a whole lot of people who are 50 and can't believe why the hell did they choose why they let themselves fall into that thing um there's a poem by philip larkin who was uh he says he married her to keep her from getting away now she's there all day And that's i don't mean that gender specific i know a bunch of women who said

[00:59:28] Jacob: That who about who you say she married him to keep him from getting away now he's there all day right yeah well that's actually very profound i think that pokes me personally too i like it um i know we had agreed on an hour do you have a few more minutes i don't want to tell you a few more minutes yeah i was curious i really wanted to ask you um i don't know if i if i feel that it is like the capital t truth if it's of everything i'm very intrigued by the stoned ape theory and um that realm of

[00:59:58] Jeremy: Uh like how language was born i feel like there's a lot of uh overlapping there so maybe disregard stone ape theory but that's totally fine are we talking i actually don't know the theory is it the idea that we got into psychedelics and pot and all that yeah so we start we climbed out of trees and we started following the cows and flipping over the manure and we ate it and it was psilocybin and over the course of a lot of years okay good so yeah no i have i have some comments about this oh okay so because i think that language i don't know if i think this i'm fascinated by the thought of language perhaps coming out of like the down the downstream effects of this but go on yeah okay so um the problem with explaining the origins of language is that we don't have a lot of data there's a fair amount of stakes in it that is anytime we're talking about social behavior and its origins there's going to be uh people who care whether it's this way or that you find a lot of that in evolutionary psychology for example um you know it's a touchy subject uh

[01:00:57] Jeremy: And on top of that there are too many theories there's also a problem in evolutionary psychology because they're actually not looking at how they assume random variation And if you can explain why something would be useful if you can say if you can name a use for something then that's as good as an explanation natural if it's useful natural selection would have generated that's not as much the problem with the evolution of language but um here i'm a stoner i almost never drink alcohol but i get stoned almost every night um i play bass and uh i play Bass in funk jazz soul bands um and sing And i practice stoned often watching extended uh run Tv while i'm doing it i have mixed feelings about that addiction but mostly by now i like it or at least i'm settled into it's a productive enough time i've actually gotten my chops together doing that and i also i don't have that feeling about getting stoned i used to be worried that it would it would injure my brain i don't find evidence that it does and my

[01:02:01] Jeremy: Neuroscience buddy says no it's a it's a very short-lived drug i've also done all those psychedelics ayahuasca mushrooms all that sort of stuff um uh i do not subscribe to that assumption About it and i can give some reasons why uh you can get animals stoned and they don't end up with language um uh and And uh that i mean that's that's a piece of evidence i'm not saying it's conclusive um but uh deacon this guy i work with he spent His first 20 years not on the question of the origins of trying but the origins of language how it evolved and um i read his book before he wrote a book called the symbolic species the co-evolution of language and brain um and uh i cried when i first read it Was before i met him before we started jamming together for 25 years i cried not because it was moving but because it was way the **** over my head no i just felt like that's totally punked by this book it was because it was it was the neuroscience the evolutionary theory the semiotics of it and what makes language

[01:03:05] Jeremy: Different from other foreign uh other forms of signs and inter you know interpretive relationships where you know a sign is about something to someone um uh he does give a more complicated explanation for how language would have evolved um it involves a lot of neuroscience that was the part that made me cry because i didn't feel like i understood that stuff um but More than that there are these things that are just so stories and i don't think the one about the stoned ape holds up um as how you would end up with a what We symbols are tokens of a type so words of a language or symbols of a Mathematical process those are symbols um and they are held together by social Convention um that is dog doesn't mean anything intrinsically um that it happens to be a Word in our language it's there are arbitrary marks that are not held as arbitrary what they refer to as anything but well it's somewhat arbitrary but it's more specific a dog does limit

[01:04:19] Jeremy: Possibilities a constraint on possibility sets that is if you're playing 20 questions and figured out that it was a dog that narrows possibilities so once again my work is mostly around constraints but i would think that it's more social constraints that would give us a need for symbols and they wouldn't start they would start out more as rituals and i think they would probably have more to do with um with uh sex actually um uh Not Junkyard Love but boneyard loves um But even then it's highly speculative and i should say that my work is far less on how language evolved but how language is different and what it's like for us mid-sized Mammals to be adapting under the drunken influence of language that i described earlier makes us incredibly prone to bad trips as we'd be really anxious and Pretty plenty uh prone to escapism And i also yeah so I can see i could definitely see a co-evolution of mind-altering drugs and language um but i wouldn't say that It originated because someone got stoned and needed words for things i wouldn't guess that's probably right or psychedelicized and needed words for things i think that those are experiences a cat could have on catnip

[01:05:51] Jeremy: Um and yes there are limitations to cat vocalization systems that would quite limit i mean so part of what it took for us to become the primates that speak Is lucky accidents around our vocal cords And all of that and cognitive changes that enable us to stop involuntary sounds and generate words instead so it takes a kind of constraint on the on spontaneous vocalization and we still have a bunch of spontaneous vocalization so um uh moaning and organ orgasm screaming crying all of that stuff the stuff that babies do laughing all of that is involuntary still and the most interesting part of that for me is prosody which is The music that underlies that it's the emotional carrier way for our words Really interesting stuff cadence and tonality and that's what all that stuff is called prosody and it's involuntary i mean i could fake it i could i could come you know it's easily faked but we mostly let it ride automatically

[01:07:00] Jeremy: Um yeah so that's oh man thanks for uh thanks for indulging me on that i the language is just so fascinating um terence mckenna again with terence mckenna he talked about he was given this example in one of his lectures uh about like kind of cadence into intonality and he was like uh What did he do is like sneak sneaker no good night no he like made up this little language as an example to communicate you don't know what i was saying i wasn't actually saying anything but you kind of can connect with the tonality of it of like i'm expressing some sort of emotion or sure which is which is and that's a whole lot of the signaling that we're actually paying attention to i mean i would see what's what struck me As i wrote this book about uh psychoproctology is um That's driving not just our um our the tonality but also It's the prime driver on what we say There's a there's a conceit out there that everybody means what they say and could define every word of what they say no that's not how we mostly operate with language we're basically animals praying and um we happen to bray in language i

[01:08:12] Jeremy: Mean i don't mean to sound cynical or fatalistic about it but i want to appreciate how much of what we say ends up coming about because we heard something that we can ape uh or parrot it gets us what we want it becomes a habit that we say it um it's a it's especially if it works that means if we can get away with it if it's if we find a way to say something that enables us to get our way it will become our way of saying things we'll keep on saying it that um and How do we get our way with it's by other people thinking we actually mean the words so um a lot of what i focus on this actually makes the psychoproctology work easy to do because it's extremely non-uh denominational it's nonpartisan um it's a it's a generic habit where you're simply praying and praying you've gotten away with praying because people think you're actually talking about words it's not at all about what **** believe i Actually don't think they have beliefs i call them trump bots they are robotically employing fake trump cards that is

[01:09:26] Jeremy: Trumped up trump cards so the word trump both means fake and means beats everything and of course for an organism that wants safety and freedom that would be ideal that you could do anything you want whatever you want whatever you do is safe and free um

[01:09:41] Jacob: Yeah some **** dress up their Beliefs in the lip service window dressing uh i mean breath they breath they dress up their ass hollery in some Ornamentation like i'm belong to this ideology or religion or culture or whatever but you don't even have to do that i mean if you're in a if you're in a relationship where you're being asked to put out more than you want to

[01:10:06] Jeremy: You'll just kind of start snarling and praying and um pretty soon you'll be an **** does that mean that you're an **** for uh cause no you can be an **** for a cause or not for a cause the cause doesn't matter it's not at all about what they claim to believe it's how they strut it would be a natural human habit if you could get away with it to simply bray in words and as long as people take it you know believe in civility and honor and respect and Valuing other people's values and tolerance and all of that you can get away with a whole lot of it i believe in those things whole habitly i believe in tolerance and listening to people i believe in that with normal people but i have to figure out whether i'm dealing with a normal people because it's exactly the wrong thing to do with an **** it's totally enabling and it's got us in a very dangerous situation Worldwide and i would say the same thing if donald trump was pandering to the left it's got nothing to do with politics it's simply

[01:11:04] Jeremy: You know you know and i love him that way because actually you could mistake stalin for a communist or hitler for an anti-semite no they were **** and but trump is really hard to mistake for anything but an **** um i mean yes you can if you if you want to believe in him if you want the perfect safety and perfect freedom that he entitles you to through this formal it's a very simple system of praying but um but no those don't those beliefs don't matter we can see that they don't matter because they're they use them for the preaching they don't have any interest in practicing what they preach so it would be true of any you know it would true stones don't have to be leftist in his in his ornamentation doesn't matter it that doesn't matter we're talking about playing god being much easier than being human and that's all you know and you can play god really easy just by using words in a certain way that basically is what i'd call **** dosing that is you **** you don't care what's true that's not the issue for you're just bulldozing through yeah oh man fascinating i really

[01:12:14] Jacob: Appreciate your explanation uh and i love where you where you take it i feel like it's like you're kind of reading what i'm thinking about next and you're pointing at it already so man thank you so much um so what are you working on right now are you working on the is your work on a-holes is that published that sounds so funny to say yes and no it is um so Uh yes and no i just got the proofs for the hard copy book back from my editor but i as my as my last edit on it i recorded The whole thing as a podcast or actually a pod class the book i let This book sneak up on me by pretending i was doing it as a class um so i wrote it kind of as a class um advanced psychoproctology for beginners um Uh i'm still working on the title but the book if anybody wants the book from me once again i don't need status i don't need money from this i am i do like to

[01:13:07] Jeremy: Have as much audience as i can for the amount of effort i put into it and also more than that because i think it's useful it's not i mean i think we i think it's the missing piece right now in the puzzle that is the biggest crisis we're dealing with is that we've never quite figured out how to humbly humble people who will say or do anything to Avoid humility that is that is the big question and if we don't answer that i think we're as good as extinct i mean i just don't think we can i don't think we have the resources to run out one more flight of fancy that taken into reality the way that we that the way this just keeps on happening so i would love to get that work out um any so you can find All of my work you find way too much of my work simply by just googling my name

[01:13:56] Jeremy: Uh you'll find all these articles i write at psychology today i have a youtube channel on psychoproctology a youtube channel on origins of life research or origins of trying research um i have a website i'm building that's coming along nicely it's at jeremysherman. com there you'll find my eight big research questions and the media page is fully populated with all sorts of stuff i'm also on facebook Quite reliably because a lot of my i write most of my essays as memes i mean i just ended up with a kind of a bumper sticker mine so i'm i put out Like 10 or 15 memes a day on instagram and um and elsewhere so that's a place to find me if you want um uh and what am i working on now All cylinders that is i'm working on this book right now today i'm working on an article uh that i'm submitting to a journal next week an academic journal on this third scientific revolution how we bring rigor to categorization um uh um yeah just a lot every other day or so i take a walk with terry at where we're working out a big chunk of his new work which is on what i'll call synergenesis which is explaining how

[01:15:10] Jeremy: Holes come together from parts how multicellularity or romance happens or how societies end up with these people with people in effect addicted to each other or elements agents addicted to each other so how does synergy happen and once again evolutionary psych or evolutionary theory in general says well it happens because it's useful and we're saying no that doesn't explain how organisms surrender their autonomy to become parts of larger whole so this is terry's current book it's called falling up he's writing it is following meaning that i we believe that a lot of it happens from losing the ability to do for yourself because of the available ability of something else and that would apply yeah so that applies to everything from why humans are addicted to external sources of vitamin c because we became encounter we came in contact with fruit and lost the ability to generate our own vitamin c after all you don't have to yeah we don't have to give you know if i give cats or dogs or elephants vitamin c you have to give it to primates because they lost the ability we know that we have lot we can trace the dna and yeah we've lost the ability because we got it from another source it's also how in a relationship you can end up losing your ability to be

[01:16:25] Jeremy: Self-affirming because you're addicted to some because someone else is self-affirming you can actually lose your ability and then when the relationship ends you have to regenerate you've got kind of going cold turf turkey off an external source of affirmation and you have to get to back to where you can regenerate your own mojo so these are and it also explains why i'm stuck addicted to grocery stores my ancestors used to farm but then there were two ways to get food one was farms and the other stores and i lost the ability to farm i could get it back it's different in different situations but anyway that's a big chunk of our work these days synergenesis explaining how synergies happen yeah oh man that sounds so great i uh me and a friend of mine who's a you know an armchair philosopher uh we always talk about like we're gonna be smart old men and we always talk about you know one day we're going to be just like old guys sitting at a you know drinking tea together and discussing the nature of reality and i feel like you guys are living uh my Hopeful goal from when i'm older that's

[01:17:30] Jeremy: I feel lucky i got i have to admit it's luck i just ended up with a life where i I happen to stumble into right opportunities and um yeah it's not a life for everyone but it for me the best use of discretionary time is sitting on the front porch of the universe speculating about it and us in it which is what we've been doing and that's like that's a good use of what life taking notes we're the only things that can because we have language we can really take notes on the whole ball of wax and us in it um i you know i love playing music

[01:18:05] Jeremy: But i actually like this stuff this feels this feels good too is what i want to say yeah it's all play it's all just such fun play and you kind of get somewhere with it seems like yeah that's right and for me so it's the oxymoron not serious play there's a play within constraints yeah um uh because a whole lot i mean i'll talk to philosophers who will tell me i had a i got in a debate with one philosopher and he said well to me it's all just poetry i said thank you man that explains to me i don't you know i know that if it's all through poetry then we're not really talking about what's real um i'll fuss elsewhere because that you know i don't need to try and persuade you if it's all this poetry right on yo that's just play you know if it's all i love poetry i write dog earl every day almost um but But no i'm thinking of this as a serious play trying to get closer and closer to understanding what reality can what reality is and uh not

[01:19:03] Jeremy: That we'll ever get good at not that will ever nail it but to at least dance you know at least to at least step on the dance floor and check it out you know all that sort of stuff

[01:19:15] Jacob: Oh man okay thank you so much man I really appreciate your time i really appreciate your perspective on so many of these things you definitely i mean just from um me being introduced for you to you through the uh the podcast thing uh i'm a fan already but now i mean just what we talked about i'm definitely going to keep diving into your work and

[01:19:34] Jeremy: It's a delight to meet you stay in touch um i'm east i'm easy i'm around

[01:19:41] Jacob: Cool okay and yeah take care and

[01:19:41] Jeremy: Thank you for having me on your show yeah of course yeah

[01:19:41] Outro: Thank you Jeremy we'll be in touch via email and yeah man take care and thank you so much again Listeners take care of yourself love yourself Drink some dang water stretch go outside go for a walk and uh Contemplate the universe from the front porch take care all right With ourselves Knowledge is power